


The Dying Cycle

by Arwen Spicer (labingi), labingi



Category: Continuation of Daughter, Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-01-22
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 23:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labingi/pseuds/Arwen%20Spicer, https://archiveofourown.org/users/labingi/pseuds/labingi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik has no memory of life before he woke up five years ago in a dream called America.  Now a man from another planet, one who claims to come from his past, is telling him it isn't a dream at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Man from Another Dream

**Author's Note:**

> (This is a draft, fairly advanced, but it will be revised and improved in the future.) This original novel set in my _Continuation of Daughter_ universe is finding a home on AO3 in hopes of blurring the lines between original and fan fic. For one thing, I want to be shamelessly allusive in this fic. There will be quotes. This chapter references _Dune_ , _Babylon 5_ , and the 1985 _Star Trek_ novel, _The Final Frontier_. These references probably don't rise to "copyright infringement" but some later ones may. I claim fan fic privilege: I will not profit, and I will credit. Moreover, my references to these works will only serve to better publicize them and increase their profitability. By the same token, I heartily invite anyone and everyone to write fic in this universe. I would be overjoyed if you made it your sandbox.
> 
> Other extant works in this universe include my self-published novel, _Perdita_ , which is a prequel to this novel, and my upcoming indie movie, _The Hour before Morning_ , which will have a very tangential connection at some point.

Again, he awoke or became aware of himself awake. Again, he'd lost his name. He'd had many once, when there had been ones to name him, but long ago he'd shed those names behind the misty veil.

The same scentless wind blew off the ocean; the same gray clouds swept high. Long ago, the air had been filled with creatures, black wings and claws and bulk; he couldn't remember their shape. Long ago, he had subdued them, or they had slipped into hibernation. Behind him, he knew, lay skeletons, and so he faced the wind. Behind him, a ghost passed, like a moth's white flapping just beyond his feet.

Talya? His depths disgorged the name and an after-glimpse of black-reed hair and bloodless skin.

A hand almost touched his shoulder, then was gone, and Matt said (again), "I hope you realize it's your fault that I've lost her."

 _I'm so tired of this,_ he thought.

Then he woke to the other dream.

* * *

"There's a hole in my mind." Erik ran a hand over his face and gazed at the shadowy square of the ceiling vent.

Matt, predictably, failed to make a Vorlon joke. He just lay leaden against Erik's shoulder.

A bit of Erik's hair scratched at his neck; he combed it away, dislodging Matt in the process. "My mind is full of American things like that: like English and science fiction and corporate protectionism. But these American things, they replace something that's gone. There's things like _Babylon 5_ in my native language. Stories, you know? But I can't remember it."

After a moment, Matt said, "Better not to." His accent was not quite Erik's, but both accents came from nowhere.

Erik leaned on his elbow to gaze at Matt, underfed as usual, which only enhanced his beauty. In the yellow streetlight (streetlight is green), Matt's pale skin glowed out of black hair and eyes, like a wax dummy--no, he wasn't beautiful at all. He wore the same old frown like it was carved into his wax. Erik kissed him, thinking it would be better to find another man, someone who didn't remind him of-- what?

"That's why I like you, Matt. When our minds buzz that way, I can almost remember the quote."

Matt turned away and clicked on the light. In the sudden, sharp yellow, the room was too big, like most rooms in America.

Erik said, "Do you remember once that I said something to you--I don't remember what--but it was in my native language, and you answered me?"

"Erik, stop the quiz about my past." His English remained stilted like that.

Erik ran a hand down his thigh. "Don't you get lonely?" The words were deliberately cruel and produced the desired result, a buzz of mind from Matt, a hand in Erik's brain like a hand on his penis.

With a rueful glance, Matt got out of bed.

Erik sat up. "I'm sorry. That was shitty of me. But I mean it: without you, I'd feel like the last of my kind." For reasons he couldn't express, his words hit the wrong chord, for him and Matt both.

Matt tugged on his jeans and reached for Erik's wallet. "I take a hundred."

Erik watched him throw on his flea market coat. He wanted to say, _You feel it too. You come here for more than the money._ But this scene was already several strokes too trite, so he held his peace and watched Matt round the bed and disappear into the hall. A moment later came the soft click of the front door. They should stick to sex. Sex and TV. In all of this dream--and maybe in all dreams--Matt was the one who made him most himself. Yet he and Matt didn't belong to each other. They just kept their eyes on each other to avoid seeing ghosts at their shoulders.

* * *

"Morning, Janice," Erik called as he swiped his key card and entered the faded plush of the front office of the Poe. It was only from the outside that the gray, windowless box reminded him of a prison. When he'd first hiked past its concrete mass, sunk in a tree-lined canyon as if hiding, he'd fantasized it was some sort of factory farm, an embarrassment to local, liberal sensibilities. The Pig Oubliette, he'd dubbed it.

"Morning, Erik." Voice tinny from the lab.

He stared at his desk without seeing it. Last night's dream itched at his mind: the beach, the ocean. When he dreamed of them, he invariably felt himself about to lose his grip on America. To anchor himself, he focused on the desk, strewn with months of notes on scratch paper. He and Janice were the only ones he knew who made a habit of taking notes by hand. Under the fluorescent lights, he took a stab at organizing them but gave up.

He glanced up at the closed circuit TV screen, envying the pines outside, sunning. Then, he booted up and started where he'd left off yesterday: the dynamics of intergenerational space travel. With half his brain, he reviewed the literature and filled in the blanks, troubleshooting closed eco-cycles. With the other half, more than usual, he thought it was weird how he knew all this. Maybe he'd studied it before he lost his memory. But he was so far ahead of the current publications that, if he had, he must have been one of the greatest minds in the field. And he wasn't.

A great mind worked from the soul. Thoughts rose like a rhapsody (he didn't know how he knew this either). Erik, however, might as well have been transcribing a unit he'd learned in high school. He just knew it, like his times tables. He didn't even care about it much. It was a competency he had, and he sold it the same way Matt sold his body.

* * *

When he'd been going an hour or so, Janice came in, graying wisps of blonde bangs plastered to her brow. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and sat down at Xiang's desk.

"You look like crap, J."

"Tyler got wiped."

That frightened him. When you went to work for a criminal organization, you naturally took on certain risks. Getting hauled in under WIPO for IP violation was the sword hanging over all their heads. Still, no one had been arrested in a year and a half. Tyler, though, had just transferred to the Poe three weeks ago, green and cocky. Erik didn't know him well enough to worry much about him, but the Commons was his livelihood, and that he worried about. "For what?"

"Those MIT molecular circuits."

"How they catch him?"

Janice rubbed at her face again. "Same as usual. He sent part of it over the internet."

"Did he use RaLEd?"

"No, thank God. He didn't code it at all; he just used plain English. Can you believe it? I feel like shit leaving him to the wolves."

"You need to protect security of the program."

"He's going to get a million dollars and five years for this. Stupid idiot."

"A million?"

"Well, maybe I'm exaggerating. Hundreds of thousands? Does it matter when you make 30K?" Janice looked old today, eyes pinched to dark points in her glistening face. "Look, I'm going to take off. Xiang's not feeling well, and I don't have the stamina to deal with her and Tyler and this place."

"Sure."

She stood. "Sorry. You can take off too if you want. It's not like we're on a timeline."

Erik grinned. "It's already the 21st century, Janice." A weak, old joke about too little, too late, which possibly wasn't a joke at all.

"Yeah. I'll be in tomorrow morning."

* * *

Alone in the Poe: Xiang out sick, Janice home with her, Tyler probably going to prison, a thought which made Erik queasy. Erik would not get wiped, for the simple reason that he didn't need to use other people's intellectual property, not at this stage anyway. Then again, if the Commons got busted, he could go down with the rest. But if he did to prison again, he would zap out right away. This particular dream allowed that. He'd just close his eyes and picture his safe spot: the brush just below the curve in the road by the 20 mph sign. And he'd wish himself there. It would hurt, but he could do it. And then he'd set up with some other group in some other state or country.

He checked out and went for a walk: a still mid-morning in the April sun, the clean scent of dust and grass, gravel crunching beneath his feet. Freedom. He loved Baydell Road, where the Pig Oubliette nestled (12864 Baydell): high and open, a mix of mansions and vineyards, liberally hidden by oaks and, higher, by redwoods. From chaparral embankments, the views cascaded down across town, all the way to the ocean, forty miles off. Chickadees peeped and flitted in the brush. In town he seldom heard them: too many cats, he'd read.

He wondered sometimes if this was where he came from. Had he grown up hiding in the woods between house lots before so many meadows had gone over to vineyards? Had that road been his first taste of asphalt? His first memory was zapping to Baydell. Had he chosen it because it was home?

He walked up two miles, loving the sun like an insect crawling out of the north-facing moss. He knew he wasn't born to sun. At the edge of the redwoods, a Steller's Jay crooned, the most beautiful bird in this region, with its dark blue body and black topknot. But it belonged to the shadows, and it told him to turn back. In the oak-sprinkled sun once again, he reflected, as usual, that it would be nice to live here, but the Commons didn't pay him nearly enough for that. Besides, the press of neighbors consoled him.

A truck slowed behind him, and he tensed as always, anticipating a threat.

"Enrique, what's up, my man?" Octavio stuck his out his pickup window. "Need a ride?"

"Hey. No thanks. Just out for a walk." His Spanish was getting rusty. Once upon a time, he'd known it better than English.

"This is my nephew, Rafael." The young man in the passenger's seat gave a half-hearted, teen smile. "He's just come up from Riverside to help out with the new tasting room for Angiolieri's. Rafael, Enrique's family are Indians from Guatemala."

They exchanged pleasant nothings for a couple of minutes, and when the pickup drove off, Erik sighed, feeling the perpetual push-pull between craving everyday words with others and wondering if it would go too far. People wanted befriend him. And he couldn't let himself be befriended; sooner or later, friends got torn apart.

America was a strange dream. Once he'd overcome the prison part, he'd found it agreeable--in the microcosm anyway. In the macrocosm, this planet's situation scared him. He wondered why his brain set it up that way: a perfectly nice apartment and job, a road to walk on and people to talk to, stuck on a planet whirling rapidly toward ecological ruin, with a populace almost entirely oblivious to the need for an escape plan. (That made him feel good about working for the Commons; at least the Commons understood.) These emotional incongruities evidenced his theory that the dream was not all of his making. That and Matt. Matt wasn't part of the dream, not of this dream.

* * *

He pondered biking to the Domino in search of Matt. But it made him feel needy, so he ran errands instead, then went home and lounged on his deck (he'd picked this apartment for the afternoon sun). He spun through the pages of an old _Star Trek_ novel from Janice's collection: _The Final Frontier_ , not _Star Trek V_ , but an earlier novel about the now de-canonized first mission of the _Enterprise_. He preferred this version; it had Romulans.

Funny how pleasant an afternoon it was. He thought suddenly of Tyler's fall and how little it mattered to him. As he reflected on his disregard for other people, guilt brushed over his content like a gray watercolor wash. Of course, Tyler might just be a figment. Then again, he might be real. They could be sharing the same dream. Feeling darker despite the sun, Erik went in to make an early dinner of fish and chips. He hated the expense of fish, which ought to be a staple.

He'd just sprayed the pan when a man appeared behind him.

* * *

Erik jumped, which was silly. In the randomness of dreaming, logically nothing should be a surprise. But then, dreams did not run on logic.

The man collapsed. His knees smacked the linoleum, hands gripping his head, and he kept on wilting till his head touched the floor. His breaths came in gasps as if he'd been plucked drowning from a lake.

In the stunned moments that Erik stood by, it dawned on him what had happened. The man had zapped. Erik knew the procedure: you imagined a place and appeared there in agony--though for this man the agony seemed upped a notch. In his place, Erik would already have been steady enough to stand up, though still blinking back the pain.

He knelt by the man. "Can you move?"

The man made some gesture toward rising but instead doubled over again and vomited. That had happened to Erik once or twice too. With soothing noises and back rubbing and a certain amount of hauling, Erik got him up and into the living room, where he tumbled onto the couch.

Erik left him there and cleaned up the kitchen floor. When he came back with a glass of water, the man was out cold. Flipping through the possibilities, Erik considered waking him, letting him sleep, calling 911, driving him to the emergency room. Let him sleep, he concluded. The pain didn't really go away till you slept, and the whole ordeal made you sleepy.

He sat on the coffee table and studied him. Red jacket, so intricately patterned it seemed to shimmer. Everything else dulled in comparison. Racially, he was white or mostly white. Short hair, curly and graying, framed a craggy face; he wore black trousers and not very formidable boots. He was... he was the Romulan Primus from the _Star Trek_ novel, but older and less attractive, and not Romulan.

 _He's a figment. I've conjured him out of a 1985 paperback cover._

He fetched the book to compare. No, it wasn't the same face, not even close.

He went back to his cooking. Maybe it was the smell of catfish that woke his guest. Erik, on alert, caught sight of his first stirrings, shut off the range, and was perched again on the coffee table by the time the man sat up and stared at him out of big, brown (Romulan) eyes. He stared as if Erik were the Mona Lisa.

"Are you okay?" asked Erik.

"It is you." The man set warm hands on either side of Erik's face. Funny how Erik let him do that without the slightest qualm. "My gods, you're alive. Are you--?" He broke off, staring hard into Erik's face.

Erik took the man's hands and drew them into his own. "You--" He was about to say, "You zapped here," when he got stuck trying to think of the word for "zapped." It was only then he realized that they were speaking his native language. Two dreams had collided: the new world and the old. Erik thought back to before he'd learned English and fallen in love with "zapping." When he'd first realized he had the power, he'd called it... "You flashed here."

"Flashed?"

"You just appeared from somewhere else."

The man stared. "I walked, you mean."

"No, you didn't walk. You were just there. But it's all right; I'm not shocked. I can do it too."

A moment's more staring. "Of course, you do it too. It's called Walking." This time Erik heard the capital. "Ishan, do you know who I am?"

"Ishan?"

The man's jaw dropped. He covered his eyes with his hand, a universal gesture of warding off a headache. Then, creaking like an old man, he stood, stumbled but righted himself and went to lean against the window.

"You know me from before," said Erik. "That's it, no?"

"From before? Before..."

"Before I woke up in this dream, in America."

The man frowned. "Do you remember anything?"

"No. Except I think some of the dreams are older--the dreams within this dream, I mean. And the language, of course. And some science but nothing about me personally." It would be natural at this juncture to ask for information, but all at once Erik realized he didn't want to. He didn't want to know why, underneath the man's frown, he could sense relief.

At length, the man said, "You seem very calm about it."

Erik shrugged.

The man's whole manner slumped, as if his body had become a sigh. He looked out the window. After a couple of seconds, he groped backward to sit on the back of the couch in the little space between it and the window, still gazing out. "Class 1 planet?"

"Yes. Its biodiversity rivals the Kiri planets, but it's also in a state of biospheric collapse." He joined the dream man at the window, facing out over rooftops to the wooded hills across the valley, softened by a hazy (sooty) sky.

"What's causing it?"

"The collapse?" Erik shrugged. "The same old things." The bitterness in his voice surprised him and exposed the strangeness of his reference to the "Kiri planets." He'd said it without thinking, and the man had absorbed it easily as if he'd said, "It reminds me of San Francisco." But now that he thought about it he had as little idea what the Kiri planets were as he had of the origins of his bitterness.

The man massaged his temples.

"Could you handle dinner?" asked Eric. "I've made fish."

"Out of thin air?" The man smiled, but Erik didn't. Dreams where fish appeared from thin air often ended in water. "Thanks," he added. "I could handle fish."

"It just needs a bit more frying."

To Erik's mild irritation, the man did not follow him to the kitchen but stayed welded to the window. It had occurred to Erik some minutes before, without his wanting to articulate it, that he didn't want to ask the man's name. He didn't like the name the man had given him either. It savored of the bad dreams.

* * *

When they sat down at the kitchen table, the man said as a sort of grace, "Our time brief." Erik understood it, but it was not his native language, nor English or any other Earth language he could place. The man's eyes widened when he tasted the catfish. "It's very good. As good as the bottom feeders from Lo Renna." He ate a couple bites in silence, then turned his expansive eyes on Ishan--Erik. "I'm glad you're alive."

Erik wasn't sure how to respond. After a moment, he said, "Am I? Alive?"

"Yes," said the man as if the question were perfectly reasonable.

That comforted Erik. This was one of the few times he'd met someone else who seemed to inhabit his world. He put down the sudden urge to phone Matt, who never answered anyway.

The man set aside his fork. He'd scarcely eaten, most likely still queasy from the zapping. "I suppose I should explain some things."

"I suppose," said Erik with reluctance.

The man glanced away, ashamed: Erik read the feeling as surely as he sometimes snuck into Matt's dreams. "You don't remember what happened. You don't remember me."

"No. You seem familiar though--or not familiar exactly but comfortable, as if you'd always been here."

The man nodded. "My name is Ghanior." He hesitated, watching Erik closely. "Does that chime anything?"

"I'm not sure." It wasn't expected exactly, yet the name didn't feel foreign either.

"You and I belong to a... a group of people who Walk through Jana."

Walk through...

Jana.

The word struck fear into Ishan. It was to be shunned, like a rattlesnake, except a rattlesnake you could skirt around, whereas Jana...

The man--Ghanior--sat forward. "You remember Jana?"

"No." Erik took a sip of his wine: pinot grigio, he reminded himself, to go with catfish. It had always been the details that kept the world around him from escaping. "But I think... I think it's what brings the dreams. It's why I dream so many dreams, and other people don't."

"I think that's probably true," said Ghanior slowly. "Jana is a dimension through which one can pass and, thus, travel point-to-point instantaneously regardless of distance." He rattled it off as a textbook definition.

"Traveling without moving." Erik got a nasty image of a deformed squid of a Guild navigator from the David Lynch movie and wondered vaguely if he was going to turn into one.

"In essence," said Ghanior, oblivious to the reference.

"And you just think yourself there."

"The mind is the navigational conduit, yes." More textbook-speak and Guild navigating. "Of course, this has to occur within a quantum matrix generated by a device." He pulled up his left sleeve to reveal a tattoo just like Erik's: on the inside of his wrist, a box with curlicues and lines and dots, not at all artistic. Erik had often told himself that the tattoo was evidence of his Indian heritage, but his heart always whispered he was lying.

He got up and cleared the table, filled the soapy tub in his sink, placed the dishes in it methodically, plates first, glasses, silverware. "But when you think yourself somewhere--" He didn't want to continue but he couldn't stop himself. "You don't just pass through. Through Jana. You get... sucked in."

Ghanior watched him from the table. "Occasionally. One can Walk through Jana without perceiving it at all--or the body can stay in one place and the mind can spend time in Jana itself, constructing mental images, like a virtual reality."

"But the body doesn't stay in one place," snapped Erik. "Or the place is... the body gets stuck _in_ Jana."

"You did for a while," said Ghanior. "It was atypical. It's over now."

"Why?" Erik's voice was small.

"We don't know. As far as our science can tell us, bodies shouldn't be able to survive in Jana for any measurable time, but yours did."

"No, why do we Walk in Jana?" He said it like a child asking why his dog had to be put down. He hated that tone of voice, but he could not unmake it. The silenced stretched long enough that he looked up from the dishes.

Ghanior gave a stiff shrug. "There are a lot of reasons. Even from the beginning of the project. Some wanted to explore the pure science; some hoped it would open up new avenues of space travel. The official reason was to find the Pilgrim."

"Who's that?"

"Just a person who was lost in Jana in an early accident."

Erik nodded, feeling he'd known that. The apprehension in his heart had known it. "Her body didn't survive."

"Not in a form that could return to real space. But yours did. She doesn't matter, Ishan: the Pilgrim. We found her years ago, within the first year of exploration. She'd become an inhabitant of Jana. She'd--"

"Changed."

"Yes. Nowadays, the speed of travel is the main draw. It has obvious applications: in war, in espionage--"

"In anything worthwhile?"

"Emergency response."

Erik laughed. Not in response to the emergency response. It was an odd, delayed laugh, as if he'd gotten the joke too late.

Ghanior came into the kitchen and stood a little apart from him. He was still unstable; Erik could see the sway in his step. "Can I help with the dishes?"

Erik gave him a towel and watched him dry a plate and set it back in the rack. "I think you've done this before."

"So?"

"So we wash dishes on... where we come from?"

"On Perdita, yes. Is that surprising?"

"Perdita?"

"Doing dishes."

"Our planet. It's called _Perdita_?"

Ghanior stopped drying. "Do you remember?"

Erik laughed again. "It's Latin. Well, it's Spanish too, but it's Latin pronounced like that, with the stress on the first syllable. It means 'lost.' It's the lost planet. And I knew it; I knew I knew it. That's why I paid so much damn attention when I saw _The Winter's Tale_."

After a moment, Ghanior said, "Those are languages from this planet? That's--"

"Weird."

"It is. It's a weird coincidence. The name comes from the old Dabunè, 'Berdida.' It means, 'world of the stars.'"

Erik clunked a cup onto the rack too hard. "If you say so. But it is the lost planet, no?"

"It was cut off from communication with other worlds for about two thousand years," Ghanior conceded. "Before our time."

Erik smiled at him. "Pay one token to the dream theory."

"It's not a dream."

Erik went back to the dishes.

"I know you think it is, but it's not."

"It's Jana," said Erik quietly. "Once you're in, there's no way out."

With a quick step, Ghanior seized him by the shoulders and turned him so they stood face to face. "This is not Jana. This is real space. You're awake in real space. You just Walked to an unspecified planet. But you're all right. You're sane, and you're safe." The sudden roughness surprised Erik. It seemed out of character for the Ghanior he'd known--and didn't remember knowing.

His cooling hands dripped water on the linoleum, silver orbs tumbling in slow motion. It was like a movie scene designed to express psychological warping. The molasses flow of time gave him ample opportunity to feel Ghanior waver, unsure what to do next. Erik grew conscious of wanting to hold him, to feel those slender hands against his back. But the impulse was futile, and he put it to sleep.

"Will you take me home?" he asked.

"Yes. That's why I'm here. Unfortunately, it's not that easy."

* * *

They took a walk around the block. Erik offered to drive them up to Baydell, where they could park and walk, but Ghanior begged off from a hike. The sun sank over the rooftops, and the sidewalks radiated warmth like gentle sleepers. Erik wondered if he was crazy to want to leave this town behind.

"So you're stuck here with me?"

"Not stuck exactly," said Ghanior. "More stopped for the moment."

Erik chuckled. Somehow he'd seen it coming: "You just can't Walk back."

"Not right now. There are two factors preventing me. The first is my health." He made a helpless gesture. "I've Walked twice in twenty hours. I need to recover before I Walk again. And there we come to the second reason. What is that kiosk?"

"Phone booth--a communication station. But I doubt it works."

"Why?"

Erik shrugged. "It's obsolete. The second reason?"

"When I do Walk, I'll have to be at my peak capacity. If you can't remember where you're going, I'll need to guide you: that takes additional strength. And then, well, there's the peculiarity of this situation."

Erik smiled again, trying to remember the last time he'd been conscious of a situation that wasn't peculiar.

"This isn't an ordinary Walk," said Ghanior.

"That's why I lost my memory."

That seemed so obvious that it surprised Erik when Ghanior hesitated. "It could be. You see, usually when one Walks, it has to be what we call a 'clear image.' That's a very strong impression of a place or a person. It's got to be something one knows. This Walk, your Walk, was different. It moved along a current external to your direction. The current, moreover, seems to push toward this location: like swimming, it's easier to go downstream."

Figured. It was always upstream, uphill, the very idea of finding home. "So this current sucked me up."

"It would seem so." He hesitated. "You haven't met another Walker, have you?"

"No."

Ghanior sighed. "Still, he may be here somewhere. He could have lost his memory, too, and not known where to find you."

"Matt." Erik couldn't believe he'd been so stupid. No, he been too methodically blind to be stupid. He hadn't wanted Matt involved with this. He wanted to keep Matt separate, to himself. "I know a man who knows Perditan."

"Tapanayn."

Yes, he recognized the name of the language. "He never told me he lost his memory, but I wager he has. He never talks about his past."

"What does he look like?"

Erik described him.

After just a bare-bones sketch, Ghanior said, "That's him; that's Mei. Gods are helped."

Erik knew the idiom meant "thank God" though he didn't know why. "Wait. He doesn't have this tattoo, like you and I. The Walking device." He indicated his wrist.

"He has the same device; it's just not color-coded the same way."

A rush of cool, evening air flicked past like truth. "Are you close to him?" asked Erik. An odd question, it shouldn't be the first on anyone's list, and yet it mattered.

"Not awfully. But he has family back home." That answer both hurt and comforted Erik for reasons he couldn't analyze.

"He said he... in a dream, a dream dream, a night dream, he said he and his lover had come to find me, and that's how he lost her. I thought it was just a dream, but it's real, no?"

"It's real." He could feel Ghanior's eyes. "You've only seen him in a dream?"

"No, I see him all the time. He just told me that in a dream. He doesn't like to talk about his personal life."

Ghanior digested this. "Mei and Asoiya were the first to follow this current to you. Asoiya got slammed. We weren't sure if Mei had survived."

Erik tried to picture being "slammed" by Jana. It hurt so much to zap (Walk) successfully that the notion of slamming conjured liquefied brains. "I think he knows she died," he said. "I think he felt it."

"She's not dead."

Erik stared at him.

"She got slammed: some force pushed her back out into real space just as she initiated her Walk."

Several emotions fled through Erik in an instant: relief, fear, anger, loneliness. For a moment, he just watched the sidewalk, but the even-spaced cracks in the pavement always made him feel like he was trapped in some digital game. He thought of Matt's grief and said, "Why didn't she try again?"

"She did. She kept getting slammed. The current was weakening, like a door shutting out the light as it swings shut."

"But you got through?"

"I came by ship--well, more like a life capsule. It allowed us to use a stronger jae shift to punch a hole back through. I was chosen largely for political reasons. The ship is a new development, pioneered by my government."

 _Yes, you would be chosen for political reasons, wouldn't you?_ thought Erik bitterly. "I've got to tell Matt his lover's alive."

* * *

At Ishan's request, Ghanior remained at the apartment while Ishan went to see Mei. While part of him felt a duty to go along, the larger part was just as glad to let it be. Laran's words kept coming back to him:

"You're the last one who should go," she'd said.

"Too bad. My government's chosen me." He'd been out of patience by then.

"He might try to kill you."

"He didn't before."

But she'd been right, of course--and he'd downplayed that risk while in session with the Ministries. With them, he'd emphasized the value of learning to navigate these currents and dismissed Ishan as almost certainly dead, though part of Ghanior had hoped he wasn't.

He fingered the knuckle-gun on his belt, contemplated whether to bio-code it. If he did, no one else would be able to fire it, which might be hindrance if he were unconscious and needed someone else to defend him. But it seemed unlikely there would be anyone to defend him in any case if Ishan lost his mind. He set the code.

For a time, he sat in the center room, a single yellow lamp and the pervasive smoky smell of this land only slightly distressing his headache. The analgesic pill Ishan had given him was starting to help. He looked out the window at the lights of the town, the quiet foreignness of the room reminding him of his first days in Ash'tor, a guest of Lastri'nom. He wondered what planet this was, ran through possibilities but nothing fit. This planet's technology was not unlike Perdita's: manual door (wood if he guessed right), electric light bulbs, no computerized household maintenance as far as he could tell. It made the layout easy to understand and oddly rustic at the same time (not at all like home on R'Aej; he forced the thought away).

The Ishan he had last seen been terrified, raving that death was the only escape from Jana. What had shaken him sane? The loss of his memory? His belief (defense?) that this was all a dream? Perhaps, for his own safety, Ghanior shouldn't break that belief. But the reflection was idle: Ghanior lacked the capacity to sustain that kind of lie.

Presently, he hauled himself up and wandered the rooms, seeking Ishan in them. The hodgepodge of furniture and appliances suggested shopping on the cheap. Worn paper books crammed shelves; Ghanior pulled a few out and stared fruitlessly at their script. Though the kitchenware, too, was old and mismatched, the kitchen itself was both scrubbed and cluttered in a manner that suggested frequent use.

He dredged up what memories he could of the Ishan from his childhood. That Ishan, too, had read liberally. But it seemed to Ghanior that his aesthetic sense had been finer. He'd had that big, crimson sitting cushion; everyone rushed to claim it when they visited. But perhaps he was simply poorer now.

A scattering of pictures adorned the walls (none in the bedroom). Ghanior spent some time before each and judged their selection to have been cautious. All were color photographs of landscapes: forest, open woodland, meadow. From what he'd seen of this region, the scenery looked local. Though competently framed, the views did not capture the imagination. They were no more than snapshots of the world outside the door. They were the photographs of a Walker who feared Walking. They presented no dangerous place. If he should accidentally direct himself to one of these locations, he could easily find his way home, even without Walking. And if he found himself stranded in Jana, he had no food here for creating visions. If anything, imaging these concrete scenes might direct him out again.

The implications saddened Ghanior and made him aware of his headache mounting. Focusing his eyes brought back the pain, so he decided to give up for the night and sleep.

Since he and Ishan hadn't discussed sleeping arrangements, he rummaged in the closets for bedding. He found a pillow and blankets, mass produced, and collapsed on the couch--then realized the lamp at the other end of the room was still on and had no remote control. He got up, turned it off, and stumbled back to the couch, knocking his shin against a low table.

When he closed his eyes in the dark, the pain in his head receded. The memory of R'Aej came back, but it was weaker, a memory of a broad, open bed with its temp-controlled blanket. He clamped his mind back on the present: different bed, different house. Different planet. New work, new corner turned.

He'd found Ishan alive. It was a mercy. He said a prayer of thanks to Tamehe'lem, felt it rather. The Messenger of God and he had never needed words. Ishan was here and calm and sane, more or less. And he lived.

"I didn't kill him."


	2. Three Walkers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt learns that this partner, Asoiya, is alive. To reach her, he becomes Ghanior's staunchest ally in the quest to leave Earth and get back to their home. Erik still hopes it's all a dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again many thanks to lounderandlouder, sixish, and my writers group (Jamie and Jodi) for the enormous help. Further edits may occur in the future.

Erik stayed out till midnight. Matt wasn't at home, wasn't at the Domino, wasn't out in the woods behind Kingsley School. It went without saying he wasn't answering his phone. Erik made the rounds three times, then waited up by his apartment another hour. Finally, he bummed a piece of paper off a SmartMart clerk and left a note telling him Asoiya was alive. The fact that Matt had never told Erik her name, even in his dreams, should sell the authenticity of it, if Matt remembered her name... which he would.

Erik pushed the note through his mail slot and went home. The idea that Asoiya had survived depressed him. He recognized envy as an old pattern with his life, even in the absence of all but five years of memory. Or was "jealousy" a better word? He'd just lost Matt, and it made him bitter. Was that so reprehensible?

At home, he found Ghanior asleep on the couch. He didn't stir as Erik came in, which seemed a bad sign. Ghanior ought to be a light sleeper, especially in a strange place. A memory stirred, no, not a concrete memory, more a realization.

 _I know this because we used to be roommates. No, we had other roommates. We were never roommates._

It was all made up anyway; it had to be. That thought alone made it manageable.

Erik sat on the coffee table and watched the night-lit outline of Ghanior's face. The low light softened the years and resurrected his beauty. And that was bad too. Erik went to bed.

* * *

Matt plucked Erik's note off his door with a touch of annoyance. If Erik read minds half as well as he pretended, he'd know when Matt needed space. He tossed the note on the counter and cranked up the heat. He was glad A.J. liked having sex outdoors, but the reedy turf had soaked him through. Without clear memory, he had a sense that he had long lived in cold exile, far from the gentler damp of home.

He changed into his sweatpants and white cardigan, the one A.J. called very early '80s. After that, he stretched out some of the kinks, then sat by the floorboard heater and faced Erik's latest intrusion:

 _Dear Matt,_

 _A man named Ghanior has come from our home planet to find us. He is a friend. Asoiya is alive. Ghanior is going to help us get home, so hopefully you ~~can~~ will see her again soon._

 _Erik_

For half a heartbeat, the world bloomed, like a firecracker, like a tiger lily; angels sang a "Hallelujah Chorus." But it was too much to believe. It had to be a joke--or a mistake. Mistake more likely than joke: even Erik wasn't that cruel. Matt crumpled the note.

And only then did the bizarreness of his response come home to him. A man named Ghanior from his home planet? It sounded like one of Ishan's B movies. Yet Matt had understood it all. The name "Ghanior" had an old, familiar shape, and Asoiya, of course, was so basic to his being it seemed impossible he'd ever forgotten her name. Yet even now, he couldn't remember her face. What was the matter with him?

Did he really believe he was from another planet?

He did. That didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was Asoiya. Yet he could not entrap himself in the hope that she still lived, not now that he'd learned to persist in this abyss where her absence was as inescapable as the absence of the sun at midnight. She was gone; hope promised only agony.

* * *

Erik awoke to pounding on the door. He glanced at the clock radio: 3:12 a.m. By the time he'd stumbled to the _entrada_ , Ghanior was standing like a woozy ghost in the dark. Erik clicked on the hall light and let Matt in.

If he'd walked in on this scene knowing only what he'd known yesterday, he might have assumed Matt was on drugs. His eyes pulled toward Erik like sunflowers.

"There's one thing I need," said Matt with surprising calm. "Did you take her name from my dream?"

Erik closed the door. "No. I got it from him."

Matt took a step toward Ghanior. "I know you."

Ghanior looked at Erik. "What did he say?"

"He said he knows you. Matt, he doesn't speak English. Use the other language, damn it; stop pretending you don't know it."

For a moment, Matt's mouth wobbled, like a shy little girl asked to speak in class. "Are you my father?" Matt asked finally in Perditan--Tapanayn.

"No," said Ghanior with an air of surprise.

"You're my uncle."

At that, Erik got a telepathic hit off Ghanior. It was sharp and pained, no different from Matt's mind when Erik jabbed him. No different. Identical. Were all minds--?

"I'm a friend of your mother's. Ghanior. Do you remember?"

Matt got the hit too; his staring proved it. After playing chicken several seconds, he said, "You're lying."

"I am not lying," said Ghanior with small, incredulous laugh.

Matt looked between them. "Where is she?" Asoiya, not his mother.

"Last I saw her, she was back on Perdita. She wasn't able to Walk here."

"But she's alive?"

"Yes."

Matt shuffled past them and fell in a lump on the couch, on Ghanior's bedding. He gazed at the ceiling.

Erik put the kettle on. That was unlikely to have bad consequences. When he got back with chamomile (which he disliked but seemed best for the time of night), Ghanior was explaining. Erik, having heard it before, just handed out the tea and watched. Matt seemed crumpled: a wilted, underfed youth in worn jeans, like Case from _Neuromancer_ \--better looking than Case but working hard to bring himself down to it. Erik wondered if hopping back into the matrix (the Neuro-matrix, not the Neo matrix) would fix him. Ghanior managed to look genteel despite undone red jacket and untucked black shirt. Both men were implacable, both a million miles away.

 _No. I'm the one a million miles away, observing through some interdimensional portal through which I can see but am unseen._

Only Erik drank the tea. No, that wasn't true: Ghanior sipped it too and said, "Ishan, could I have another Blockit?"

Erik got up and got him an ibuprofin: how funny that his brain recognized a brand name from some distribution arm of the Pharmaceutical Consortium on an alien planet he didn't remember. A sign of dreams.

"Thanks," said Ghanior.

"So when can I get back to her?" said Matt. Through his fog, Erik realized it was at least the third time he'd asked some version of that.

"We can get started tomorrow. My tracker says my ship's just six kilometers from here." He didn't mean Earth kilometers but near enough.

"We should start now," said Matt.

"I need more sleep," said Ghanior. He ought to have thrown off the headache by now.

"Go home, Matt," said Erik, sensing protest on the horizon. "You heard what Ghanior said. He can't help us Walk back anyway until he's stronger. That's not going to happen this very instant. So just go home and rejoice that she's alive."

Matt nodded as if that actually sank in. But as he was heading for the door, he turned back. "You will need a long time to heal to Walk, Ghanior, no? So maybe this is faster: take your ship back through real space."

"The ship's designed for Jana," said Ghanior. "And even if it could ripple through real space, we'd need to fix this planet's position relative to the rest of the Continuation. But according to my ship, its stars don't chart. It's a very long way from home."

* * *

At home, by the heater again, Matt tried some futile breathing exercises while he reviewed what his vestiges of memory took to be the facts: he and Erik and Ghanior did, indeed, come from the same place (not the same planet, as Erik had put it, but connected planets, connected family). While he and Erik had both lost their memories, Matt's loss was less encompassing. Already he could feel details bleeding back, perhaps because Asoiya could not remain buried.

Ghanior believed she was alive; his mind didn't lie about that. Matt still couldn't make himself seize that hope. His life--he was certain--had been a litany of hopes dashed. That Asoiya, too, should be taken from him seemed as inevitable as the flow of a tragedy up to its final act. (He understood all of a sudden why, of all the movies Erik had shown him, he always found the tragedies truest.)

None of that changed the fact that he would give his last breath to find her. He wondered only why he'd bothered to keep breathing, believing her gone. It spoke of the congenital flaw, the crack in his brain. His lineage had been defective; he knew that without remembering how.

But if it lay in their power to sew up the wound of their separation, they would obviously do so. They would defy the defect--Asoiya and himself--just as they always had.

* * *

No dreams (night dreams). That wasn't uncommon if Erik added up all the nights in a week, but it always felt uncommon, like a safe place to catch your breath when you've been running and running with a stitch in your side.

Over English muffins, Ghanior took another Advil (generic Advil, generic Blockit, "take two aspirin..."). He washed it down and made a face. "What do you call this?" He held up the Tardis mug.

"Coffee."

"It's execrable."

"Try more agave nectar."

They had both gravitated to the bedroom to eat, where the sun shown through the eastern window. Both sun suckers, they sat cross-legged on the bed, breakfast on the TV tray. The execrable coffee smell stabilized the dream. Ghanior massaged his head.

"What's wrong with you?" asked Erik.

Ghanior jumped a little, then seemed to catch the gist of the question. "Jana."

"Yeah, but it's more than that. I've Walked through Jana, and it doesn't hit me that hard."

"My luck, I suppose." As Ghanior sipped his coffee, it occurred to Erik that he hadn't commented on anything Erik fed him--no, he'd commented on the fish. Hadn't he? "I used to be a dancer. Do you remember that?"

Erik shook his head.

"Nor I, except through the sea mist of the very long ago. I used to be a really good dancer. And then, within the first year I was Walking, I suffered a massive neural disruption. I was hospitalized; I was operated on. The Ashtorian military did a good job, really cutting edge: I retained higher cognitive function with negligible debility and lost no emotional functionality and no major motor function."

"But it upset your balance."

"They were never able to correct that--or they've always assured me it's not worth going back in and disrupting something else, which I accept."

An orange line of sun was creeping up Erik's knee. It seemed alive, like a slug, almost stationary till you looked away. But when you looked back, it had gotten away from you. "And it makes Walking more painful."

"For three years after my surgery, I couldn't Walk at all. That was a tech problem though. You see, I'd been Walking on a prototype jae generator open link, and it didn't sync properly with my brain. Eventually, they fitted me with a first-gen portable." He flashed his tattooed wrist. "It synced better, so I could Walk again, but the damage was done. Since my brain has been extensively rewired, so to speak, it has less give to absorb the shocks of Walking, pardon some mixed metaphors."

Erik didn't want to pardon the metaphors. He wanted Jana concrete; concrete was safer. But he couldn't say that sort of thing without sounding like an idiot--or a madman, and he'd determined to try very hard to be coherent.

Ghanior poured a second cup of coffee. "As for you, you were in Jana Program ever--"

"Don't." In response to Ghanior's stare, he forced a smile. "Not now. It's all a bit much, all at once."

A clipped nod.

Erik searched for something safe. "So that blue box on your cup is--" The burring of his phone cut him off. Matt for the third time that morning. All of a sudden, you couldn't unglue him from his phone.

"I've waited as long as I wait," said Matt.

"All right. Come over." Erik clicked the phone shut, then flipped it open it again. "I'm going to call in sick." With Xiang out sick, it would make sense.

 

* * *

When Ghanior answered the door, Matt could feel his mind planed like a road cut through a hillside. No, rather, Ghanior's mind was like a fault stabilizer, meting out earthquakes in imperceptible tremors while the greater energies built and built in preparation for the inevitable break.

"Good morning, Mei."

Matt refused the name, but Ghanior's mind refused to hear him, the tremor unfelt.

"Are we going soon?" said Matt in words because no one listened to real speaking.

"Ishan's getting his coat."

Ghanior was Matt's uncle, however much he denied it. He could sense ties to Mama uniting them.

"Okay, let's go." Erik emerged, flipping the collar of his jacket.

Matt followed Ghanior out the door, feeling him an enemy, for all it was clear that he didn't intend to be.

* * *

Ghanior had a tracking device in his arm. Or that was Erik's first impression, which turned out to be wrong. What he had, imbedded in his right wrist to keep it well away from the Jana tech in his left, was an on-off switch that activated the iPhone fused to his brain. Something less than an iPhone actually: it had nothing resembling internet access (even on its home turf). Ghanior said that magnitude of direct neural input proved risky for the human brain. Some used it anyway; he didn't, not with his "cross-wiring." Instead, he had a tracking device and some other basic functions.

Erik followed its instructions up Baydell Road. He pulled the car over where Ghanior told him, right by the 20 mph sign.

"Fuck me," he laughed. "This is where I landed."

"Well, yes, of course it is," said Ghanior. "It's the output point for the current. So you do remember your arrival?"

Erik stood at the edge of the asphalt, staring down the canyon at the expanse of woods and vineyards, the sun unraveling the last lacy strips of morning fog. He savored the moment, wanting never to go back. "I remember being here, not knowing how I got here."

"Mei?"

"Mm?" Matt shook himself out of his thoughts. "I landed here too. I remember the same." He started down the hillside, retracing that years-old path.

Ghanior followed. After a couple of halting steps, he skidded down swiftly on his backside, so undignified that Erik felt a gentle pity. A couple of meters down and the ship was in view, not that there was much to view. It looked like an old lunar lander but without the comic little legs, about the size of an upended minivan.

"I hate to say it, but this is obvious as hell," said Erik.

Ghanior glanced back at him. "What is?"

"Your ship." Erik waved at it. "Do you have a cloaking device for this thing?"

"A what--? you mean a diffraction shield?"

"Yeah," said Erik, recognizing the term.

"Not standard, but it should be possible to implement one. We should have thought of it really. Is this a high surveillance planet?"

Now they stood next to the ship, it was taller than they were. Ghanior fiddled with some unlocking procedure of mysterious mechanism.

"Middling," said Erik. "What it is is a very populous planet and with a high enough degree of vagrancy that, if there's a structure around, some homeless person will find it."

Ghanior smiled. "Ah. Those things."

That stumped Erik for a second, till he realized it was a reference to their conversation yesterday: why biospheric collapse? Same old things.

With a very science fictiony click and whir, a side of the capsule slid open. Once they were inside, Erik wondered why they'd bothered. There were four seats and a lot of control panels (with real, physical buttons, like something from the 1950s). It was gray and sunless until Ghanior clicked on a light. Then, it was dull white-lit like a high cloud cover. The three of them sat.

"What now?" asked Matt.

"Now," said Ghanior. "I need to learn the language."

"How long will we be here by your plan?" asked Matt with a certain horror.

Ghanior opened a compartment and pulled out a comical object that looked like a wire basket. "This is a new device that has been approved outside of Ranlax just in the past year. It writes language pathways directly into the brain."

Erik was at a loss to pinpoint the source of his anxiety. Part of him wanted to laugh at the geekery, but on balance he felt much as if he'd been told he needed a root canal.

"So it won't be years," said Matt. "But how long?"

"Long enough that I'll need to communicate with the locals; hopefully not so long as to make it worthwhile to learn the language the conventional way. That's all I can tell you right now, Mei." He flipped some switches (real switches) and the capsule hummed to life. The door whirred shut, giving Erik instant claustrophobia; he kept his breathing carefully steady. With some hard-to-follow gestures, Ghanior conjured a holographic screen in the air. It, at least, was pretty--and 3D, a topography in the folds of which Ghanior's hands periodically disappeared. Like--no, a little too like being sucked into Charybdis. He looked away from the whirlpool.

Ghanior held out the basket to Erik. "First we'll need a copy of the language from your brain."

"No." Erik kept his hands in his lap, unwilling to even touch the thing. "You don't want to copy my mind. I don't want you to. Why don't you use Matt's? Look at him: he's border-itching to do anything to get us out of here."

Ghanior glanced at Matt. "Ishan, I can't use him; he's not human."

Erik played that sentence over a time or two. "He's not?"

"He's Pey."

"He's what? Matt, did you know about this?"

Matt gave him a bewildered look. His eyes, it had often struck Erik, were unnaturally big, his skin unnaturally white.

"So you're telling me he's an alien?"

Ghanior sighed, the basket slumping into his lap. "You two really have forgotten everything." He massaged his forehead. "The Pey are engineered from humans. Yes, Mei's neural pathways are very similar to human, but this language-transfer process needs the tightest possible match. Besides which, Pey have less language ability than humans, so even if a copy of his brain would do, it wouldn't be the best option."

"Engineered to do what?" asked Erik.

"Oh, for gods' sake, it was six thousand years ago. It doesn't matter. Ishan, I just need to copy your language knowledge, not your mind, just the rote language."

"Let me out," said Erik.

No one moved.

"Just let me out for a second. I need to be outside."

Ghanior flipped a few (real) switches, and Erik climbed out onto the tan-pebbled earth among skinny, water-starved Douglas firs. Vaguely, he thought, "Oja," aware it was a place on Perdita, a place that maybe looked like this. He crunched down the hillside a little farther, until he spied someone's back fence in the distance. Then he sat on the hard, solid earth, a very slight breeze tickling his skin.

After maybe five minutes, Ghanior joined him.

"You have no subtlety," said Erik, not entirely sure what he meant but quelling the urge to follow it up with, _and you never did._

"Very likely," said Ghanior.

"I don't want to do this. I can't explain it, but it's a bad idea."

After a moment, Ghanior said, "If we don't do this, then I will be fairly useless. You and Mei will have to negotiate any assistance from the locals. It's not reasonable."

He wants to hang out with other people, Erik realized. It was such a basic drive, one so powerful and human, that he almost smiled. "What assistance to do we need from the locals anyway? Their technology is centuries behind this."

Ghanior shook his head. "How can I answer that? All we have are questions now. Why this planet? Why did a current bring us here? What's our astral position? We can't answer these questions without exploring the world. In addition to which, we'll need food and supplies. I realize you could translate for me, but--"

"No, you're right. The thing is sooner or later someone will try to talk to you, and if you can't speak English, they may assume you're an illegal immigrant and try to deport you, and since they won't be able to figure out what country you're from, they'll probably just stick you in prison while they work on it and then forget you're there. So you need to be able to communicate, and you need a false ID that will sell you as a legal resident. And to be a legal resident, you should have some English proficiency. So..."

They sat in silence for a while. At length, Ghanior said, "I'm sorry. The device truly does just draw from your language center, not your memories or feelings. See how you remember Tapanayn without remembering Perdita? These are different processes."

A thought occurred belatedly. "What about your brain? You've had a lot of reconstructive surgery. Is this device going to be safe for you?"

"The neurologists didn't anticipate any problems." His voice was too flat.

"But you're at a higher risk?"

"This entire mission is high risk," Ghanior snapped. "Being a Walker is high risk. We were all assigned from childhood to live lives that are high risk. Don't--just please be still about it."

Erik stood, breathing slowly to cool his temper. _What did he do to me that makes me so quick to anger? (What did I do that makes him so quick?)_ He peered at the fence in the distance, wondering whose land they were trespassing on. It had to be someone's; in dreams one was always a trespasser. He whirled at a step behind them: Matt standing next to Ghanior, who sat with his head on his knees.

"You both forget," said Matt, "we need logical steps. Ghanior, this is high risk, you say, and you might be hurt. So you should make the shield first. That way, the ship will be safe even without you."

From Ghanior's knees came a little laugh. "That actually makes a lot of sense." He got up. "I'll take a look and let you know if I need supplies."

* * *

Matt watched Ghanior disappear into the ship. Ghanior had said he was Pey. It was as if he had been alone and nameless and a mind had called his name.

They had been Pey, he and Asoiya, and a ship that looked not unlike Ghanior's had taken them away from Home. He couldn't remember the name of Home, but he remembered giant, palmate leaves glowing almost golden with the sun at their backs. There, they had been Pey, but they had been outcast Pey.

What that mean? What did it mean to be Pey? Pey had true speech, mind over word. Pey never existed alone; they had been bad Pey, he and Asoiya. They had joined to each other too late. Before her, he had been alone. And now again... he was bad Pey.

When they were still little, the ship had come, and then they were among humans but not human. They exchanged one hostile land for another. Then, that land for America. And Ghanior would pluck them from America and return them to a hostile land. All lands exuded hostility, except...

Except in Jana?

He felt eyes upon him and turned to see Erik, his companion without togetherness, his exemplar of the absence.

* * *

At a first assessment, Ghanior told them he should be able to generate a shield using systems already onboard ship. That was good news, since it seemed unlikely that Radio Shack would carry much in the way of cloaking technology. (If anything, the Commons might.) But Ghanior did send Erik and Matt off to pick up lunch.

It pleased Erik and needled him to be alone in his car with Matt. Matt stared out the window, plainly thinking of Asoiya.

"Do you remember her?" asked Erik, turning off Baydell and onto the highway.

Matt stirred as if waking. "I remember the feel."

"How did she feel?"

Matt considered. "She's red and white--and glows like a light bulb. She glows and is red and white, like a Christmas ball."

That seemed the most words he'd ever heard Matt say. He pictured Matt (a chibi Matt) with a candy-striped ball in his hand, face illuminated with childlike wonder. A black and white boy holding red upon white.

He drove for a couple of blocks, then asked tentatively, "Matt, will you still fuck me?"

"Why wouldn't I?" His voice was neutral, uninterested. After a moment, he said, "I remember: we were very small, and Mother told me to take Asoiya up the hill. So I carried her up. It was very green, greener than here, jungle green." He paused. "It was so Far could die."

"Far?" He got no response. "That's someone you remember?"

Matt shook his head. "I think, not my father."

"How old were you?"

"Three or four. I think, Asoiya was one."

"So you grew up with her--like a sister?"

"Naturally. She's my nn!" The last word wasn't a word exactly. It was half sound, half telepathic surge: fierce, indignant.

It meant... Erik couldn't remember.

He gripped the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes just as the stoplight turned red. From a distance, he felt the car lurch to a stop, but shade had spread over everything as if someone had thrown a black blanket over them. Not red and white, but dark, maybe purple: another presence waited in another dream. Someone honked. He hit the accelerator.

"Where you going?" said Matt.

"What? Fiesta."

"We just passed it."

So he took the next right and backtracked around the block.


End file.
